Method and apparatus for validating and ranking resources for geographic mirroring

Abstract

Method and apparatus for validating and ranking of resources that may be switched between a primary system and one or more backup systems at a single site. One embodiment provides a method for ensuring accessibility of one or more disk units by a system, comprising: configuring a disk pool for the system; validating availability of the one or more disk units for the disk pool; verifying that the disk units are at the same site as the system, and selecting one or more valid disk units for the disk pool. The method may further comprise ranking of each disk unit for the disk pool and selecting one or more valid disk units for the disk pool according to ranking.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] 1. Field of the Invention [0002] The present invention generally relates to management of computer resources. More particularly, the present invention relates to configuration and accessibility of resources for resource pools that are physically disperse. [0003] 2. Description of Related Art [0004] Modern computer systems that service enterprise operations, such as sales or manufacturing operations of a large company, cannot tolerate long periods of unavailability. Disaster recovery has traditionally focused on unscheduled downtime due to, for example, power outages, natural disasters, site disasters, system hardware or software errors, application malfunctions and deliberate acts of sabotage. Unscheduled downtime has usually resulted in unavailability of computer resources so that backup systems from a remote recovery site could be used to restore operations. The business interruption may be many hours or even days. [0005] Modern electronic commer...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0013] Generally, embodiments of the invention provide systems and methods for use in computing system groups that maintained redundant resources at geographically disperse locations in order to, for example, increase availability of the entire computing system group. The resources, such as disk units in disk pools, that are maintained at each site, are able to be switched between a primary system and one or more backup systems at a site. Each separate geographic location is referred to as a “site.” The primary system, any backup system(s) and one or more resources that are located a given site are able to be configured in a cluster to provide improved availability at that site. A cluster is defined as a group of systems or nodes that located at a site or distributed among multiple sites, where the nodes work together

Problems solved by technology

Modern computer systems that service enterprise operations, such as sales or manufacturing operations of a large company, cannot tolerate long periods of unavailability.

Unscheduled downtime has usually resulted in unavailability of computer resources so that backup systems from a remote recovery site could be used to restore operations.

The business interruption may be many hours or even days.

These scheduled downtimes introduce disruption into the operation of the system and are also difficult to accommodate.

These systems generally maintain redundant resources, such as data storage units, that contain duplicates of a primary res

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